News

After your recent review of another knife edge tonearm, I was 'planning' an impulse buy of the Jelco 950L or 950S but had hesitated...and you know what happens to he who hesitates.

Thanks for that update.

;-(

I have owned a LOT of Jelco and Jelco sourced (OEM) tonearms over the years. They have all been excellent performers and at wonderful prices.

This is really sad news.

Hopefully, (fingers crossed) someone will buy them out and return them to the marketplace...

This is very unfortunate timing as SME has also ceased operations. Does anyone have experience comparing the SME IV, V or 309 to a Jelco, such as the Wand? I haven't read any comparisons although they share profiles. Thanks Two of the most dependable arm manufactures gone in one year. Very sad.

I am just praying that during this trying time Lyra is keeping Yoshinori Mishima in a hermetically sealed, germ-free plastic bubble…

Just curious

To the analog/vinyl industry. They made tonearms for quite a few manufacturers. If I am not mistaken the Linn Basik & Basik Plus were all Jelco arms and Linn recently came back with the Linn Majik tonearm which was quite an improvement over the shoddy in comparison Project arm. Depressing news, the WSJ reported yesterday on permanent factory closings here in the US. I fear this is only the beginning of bad news on the hi-fi front. Very distressing news.

They make good to great quality arms and they might consider new options of super precision arms not that the market has a void. Is Ortofon still in the Tonearm business? There are still many great arms out there, regardless.

I really dig my high-value Jelco ST-750! (Thankfully, it's new.) I mounted it on my HW-19 all by myself! (Lol.. silly but a point of pride.)

Michael is obviously right here, the industry suffers hugely, and probably to a much greater effect, given Jelco was a price firmly in the entry-to-mid-level market and an arguably a better-value tonearm than Rega at it's price point (and/or Project, as Volvic states above). SME is just amazing, but again thousands for a great tonearm.

There is VPI as well. I will commit to a Prime in the next year to take advantage of the that platform's excellence, but for value-minded music lovers, most are stuck now.

I wonder if Ortofon could fully engage themselves in their own (fully) tonearm game? I know they base almost all of their designs on the Jelco... but perhaps this could mean something great, by way of necessity?

A decade ago I decided to buy the Jelco then top model SA-750D. One model lower was the SA-250ST, later a S version came along the product range as well as 10" and 12"versions and they succeeded in getting popular as fairly low priced quality products.

Some short while ago Jelco had expanded their arm business with a whole range of new models. The latest TS-550S is the successor of the SA-750D, however with one big difference: the TS-550S is no longer the top model the SA-750D was although in reality they look exactly the same. The TS-550S hovers somewhere below the middle as we now have a 350, 550, 850 and 950 and L versions of them, all at once...

So if someone now is looking for a quality tone arm, my guess is that this someone don't start to look at their 2nd one on the ladder, but the 3rd and finally 4rth are priced way more then the 750D once was, with the 950 double the price of the 750.

Its my speculation that this might have something to do with it as well...

Get ready to see more of this, sadly. First of all, “reasonably priced” is relative. Example: $1200 may be reasonable to one person, but a small fortune to another.
Be that as it may, the indirect effect of Covid-19 is personal economics. With many losing jobs and other incomes, there is no discretionary funds for expensive or in some cases, even relatively inexpensive audio gear. It is a harsh reality.
So, should these manufactures reduce prices by large percentage? That is entirely up to them, but in most cases I would think it highly impractical. Sure, there are those that gouge and are greedy, but by and large, most aren’t that way. Realistically there is a laundry list of expenses. If an item cost $100 to make, it simply can’t be sold for $130, that is not enough to cover anything but the parts, but then who is going to make it? There are many other costs to making anything, more or less depending in the business model.
Sadly, many folks can’t even afford a $99 Schiit Magni at this time, so prepare to hear a lot of manufacture complaints and / or shutdowns unless the 1% can sustain all of them, but that is also unrealistic.
Is it sad? You bet your life and we can only hope things will get better, but none of us have crystal balls. Even if some makes can adjust prices a little, in the immediate history it won’t help unfortunately. I would hope that those companies that would attempt that find a way to hang on and hopefully have it pay off. I hate to lose any decent audio company.

It is clear from the email that Jelco had neither made any provision for training younger employees to take on the legacy nor had they invested in up to date manufacturing equipment.

So I regret that Covid-19 or not this vulnerability means they would have had to close down in the short to medium term anyway.

Let us hope that their failure may leave a gap in the market that someone will fill to our benefit.

Unfortunately, a lot of high end companies were simply a few folks working out of their garage, Probably not destined for a long business existence, or a long term profitable enterprise; the virus has shortened that time considerably, maybe the silver lining is that these folks are no longer essentially bearing a dead horse!

when he asked me a bunch of questions about getting into vinyl, the Japanese audio enthusiasts are largely responsible for the survival and re-emergence of vinyl playback. We owe them a large debt of gratitude. They kept the faith and supplied the demand when most of the rest of us thought that vinyl playback was not worthy. The Covid crisis is not going to last forever and other manufacturers will likely fill the void left by Jelco. If Jelco's business model was not sustainable-and I suspect it was not-the new alternatives will be higher priced. That is just the law of basic economics. What remains unforeseeable is whether future vinyl enthusiasts will gravitate towards the old fashioned S-shaped metal arm with bayonet mount collette. You can argue about design virtues all you want, but marketing and reality don't necessarily align. My perception is that Jelco arms were the subject of a niche market within a niche market. I would not own a Pro-ject arm myself, even their best model, but young emerging vinyl-philes are likely to buy with their eyes. Can old fashioned arms compete with carbon fiber and 3D printed arms and the like?

Does Origin Live make its own arms, or are they made for them? In either case, they're yet another outfit from whom one can get arms.

manufacturers will likely fill the void left by Jelco.

One supposes one of those will get that "obsolete mechanical equipment" for "a song" - and perhaps the designs and carry on at least the OEM business.

I am fan of often reasonably priced Jelco tonearms. This is sad news. I am also a fan of Audiomods and Wand and a few others that build fantastic arms below the $1k price point.

I am concerned that there is a big gap between under $1k tonearms and the uber priced $5k tonearms.

I also wish more turntable manufacturers marketed products that made it easy for the end user to swap tonearms. The vast majority make this difficult/costly/impossible. Tonearm swapping should be as easy as cartridge swapping.

I recently upgraded a VPI HW-19 and installed a custom made Audiomods tonearm. The results were spectacular. I own more than a dozen turntables and my upgrade competes with the best.

Anyone who has read reports of installs of arms by the late AD and Michael know that installing(drilling) is an exact science if to be done right.

I often thought about just buying a new table to replace my old Dual 502, but loved the high torque AC motor. The metal plinth WAS an issue as much harder to drill than wood to get the distance right.

I'm glad I did it and put a Rega RB202 on it as I think the cost of the arm was the right mate for this used table. I thought about an SME, but at multiple times the value of the table, I gave up that idea. Most would have probably bought a Project Debut Carbon TT and been over it.

There is great enjoyment in doing something like this that comes out well in the end. Enjoying vinyl takes some effort.

My Comet still has the original (OEM-supplied) Jelco SA-250ST on it, and while it "looks high end" I am aware that it does not have the best bearings, for example. Wondering if the least-expensive 9.5" "Wand" should be a decent lower cost upgrade.